Initial Props and Costumes Ideas

The costume our main character will be wearing is very simple. We decided on this as it is very basic and has a youth look about it which will show the audience he is just another ordinary teenager. By being an ordinary teenager the audience should see him as a nobody and that he is "getting nowhere". Another idea is that as we wanted our character to become a better person as he wants to get out of trouble. The religious cross represents this and his hope for change.

By Christian Sheen

Initial Storyboard

Here is our initial storyboard. After many discussions within our group we agreed on changing certain parts of the video, but still sticking to our initial idea of focusing on our protagonist. This was because we thought some shots wouldn't turn out as good as we first assumed, and may come across quite silly.

By Christian Sheen

Initial Story

We were originally going to concentrate on using a wide arrange of symbolic references. This included a scene with a long alleyway representing our characters journey to death after he had been stabbed in the real world. In this scene we were going to include someone dressed all in black to represent death itself, but instead of a wearing black robes for a more traditional 'grim reaper' look, we wanted him with more casual clothes (hoody, trainers) to give it an modern urban edge. Here we would have him relentlessly follow our main character giving him no chance of escaping death, as his time has come.

This idea was heavily influenced by the music video of our song 'Getting Nowhere' which included a lot of symbolic references as well. The reason why we decided to scrap this idea is that it was hard to pull off and actually make sure our audience would understand the symbolism. We learnt from this mistake last year when making our thriller, as audience feedback of our final film told us that some people found our story hard to follow, and therefore we would not want to repeat this mistake this year. Also when showing our media presentation of some of our initial song choices to our class, some of our classmates did not understand the symbolism of the video 'Getting Nowhere' and found it slightly confusing.

Another reason for the change in the story was filming the scene where our character is attacked. We decided that this just wouldn't look right and fit the conventions of a music video. This was the same with the chase scene leading up to this. We wanted to do deviate from this as it almost felt like we were filming another thriller from last year.

We are instead going to concentrate on something more basic which our target audience can relate to such as youth culture. We are going to focus on making our video look more captivating and interesting to watch rather than giving it more of a deeper message. We still plan to keep the video about our character and the struggles he faces in the area he lives such as drugs and violence. We are also contemplating on keeping our video non-linear (e.g.the start is the end) like our initial story but show it very clearly so our audience will understand. We are very keen on this idea as it is something different.


By Christian Sheen

Inspirations and Influences

When trying to find ideas for our music video, we looked through various music videos on Youtube. At first, we came across Ed Sheeran's A Team video and thought that a lot of the shots in that video were creative as they showed the protagonists facial expressions. The shots he used were simple, but yet very effective. We originally were going to base all our ideas around that one video and go from there. Shortly after looking through other videos, we thought that we could merge lots of ideas into one. The shot below is a mid shot which is the most common shot used when filming but in music videos, it isn't as popular. We quite liked the idea of having shot's which helped tell a story rather than the commonly used 'rapid editing' with just random clips of the artist singing.

In the A Team video, we liked the fact that the woman was poor and did bad things for money. With those ideas, it fits in with the lyrics to our chosen song. So we went with the 'poor' theme and decided to use council estates and various other non-wealthy locations to use as our setting. After our first day filming, we realised we couldn't entirely base our music video on the A Team's video, so once again we looked on Youtube for more ideas. We came across Example in his video, Change the way you kiss me. This video has a scene at the beginning where he is getting ready and there are shots which enticed us to base a scene in our video on that. Below is the main close up shot which we really liked as well as the idea of washing his face. It fits in with our song as the main character does illegal things and washing his hands and face represent him trying to wash away his sins.

While just searching for music I actually like, I came across a song called Burial by Archangel (Mt Eden Remix) with an amazing music video. It was mainly all free running and dancing, but the editing and colour schemes were a big influence as to what I wanted our video to look like. There were a couple of effective  shots used in that video which we wanted to use. So next time we go to film, we'll definitely keep some of the shots used in mind such as the wide long shot which is below of a man dancing. It's really original and presents a nice smooth effect to the viewers.

We also drew many inspirations and influences from British Urban Cinema, particularly that set in urban areas of London. We are able to take ideas from Urban cinema as our chosen song "Getting Nowhere" has strong urban themes written in the lyrics and nature of the song. Examples of such urban films include Kidulthood and Adulthood. Both films are set in urban London and follow several characters around showing struggle concerning area, relationships drugs and jobs. These themes I feel we could adopt and use as positive inspiration for our production, particularly in terms of setting and the isolated themes that are demonstrated in both films. Also in Kidulthood there are drug under stories, another idea that we can adopt to feature in our plot to again demonstrate the urban struggle and pressures that some people are under in urban London.

By Charlie Head & Tom Beal

Magnetic Man- 'Getting Nowhere' Lyrics Analysis

By Tom Beal